Mitch

YAY!!! I really wanted to get this one. Thanks!!! This mag is the BOMB Do you have my mailing address on file?

Did you pick the winner yet. I'm getting excited! Did I miss it the post?

I'm in. exited to try it!

It depends on what your anchoring into and how big we are talking about. In grass, I think the Storm force is fine. It is an angle iron placed angle up with a ring on one side and 12 inch ground stakes driven through the holes on the other. The ad above is a little unfair to the Claw Aircraft Tie Down System, because it pulls at a 45 deg angle for Storm Force and straight up for the Claw. The Claw is also a very reliable system. And cheap (https://www.amazon.com/The-Claw-C101-Tie-Down-Anchor/dp/B002RXJEHI) <25 bucks with A prime. Some people just go to the hardware store and get 3/4" x 36" steel stakes (the kind they use for concrete forms) and drive one or more of them into the ground. In sand, you need big sand anchors and a shovel. Two or more for the big stuff. Now here's my personal way. If you have a half or 3/4" webbing sewn or tied onto your anchor, you can lark's head the flight line on to the middle someplace and it won't slip. I put a knot (or actually sew and fold over) on the end to the webbing to be safe, but I've never seen it budge. Some people use a climbing figure of 8. I've never figured out why it's better than the carabiner you have to attach it to. For small and medium sized kites, I make my own sand stakes that work great. I'll send pics if you want. The army makes sand/snow stakes, too. Hope this helps.

Re developing a standing wave with the fly line, I've seen a standing wave with one of my kites and the line leading to the drogue behind it. In fact, I've read that the tow line for a drogue should me a non-integer multiple of the length of the kite (e.g. not 2x or 3x the length) to avoid this phenomenon. There's a great old black and white newsreel of a bridge falling down because of a standing wave amplifying the force of the wind. You know you're a master flyer when you can look at the kite and line and say, "I think that's a G sharp set up".

Please note the very next thread re the Paralift. I've never seen one but the review is positive. It looks like a sled/foil hybrid with only 4 bridal lines. might be worth a try.

As a set of joined air channels, the entire breadth of an inflated foil contributes to the wing shape fore and aft. They also can define the profile side to side better than a sled and are more rigid in that dimension. They have more lift surface per square foot of kite. I've rarely seen sleds used as lifters because they fold more easily when you pull on the bridal, which is attached to the wing tips. The foils are less flexible across the wing line so they stand the strain on the bridal without folding and loosing lift. Most big lifters and almost all traction kites are foils. In fact, big sled kites have to start to add more spars or, more usually, more air channels, thus emulating foils. Sleds are slightly lighter and generally cheaper. Way easier to make. My experience is that they lift in lighter winds. They generally have simpler bridals, so there is less to fuss with and tangle. I have a Kaykite which is a sled with two large air channels along the sides. I love it. It is seconds to deploy and it flies in any wind, but it has about half the pull of my smaller Prism Snapshot (a duel line).

My stnd is getting pretty frayed. Time to win a new one!

I'm with them. You would never think there was enough wind in the midwest for a midvent, but the fall winds remind me that I could use one. Got a Zen, a 2, and a full sail, so the midvent is next.

I think you've come up with a reasonable compromise model. Partition off the mag within the forum so we could read it through like a magazine, enjoy the articles all in one place and at one time, etc., but have the enhanced search capacity and single-front-door access of placing it in the forum. That's the way I vote. :-)

I want in! If one B series is good, two is better. Time to train up.

While I don't have the LWH, I do have the almost-as-large Like a Rolling Stone, as well as an Urban Ninja, a C'est la Vie and an I'll Be Back. Each of them have very different flight characteristics and the make and quality are fantastic. I can only imagine that the 240 would be quite different in speed, agility, response to subtle wind turbulence/updrafts, and other glide ratio etc from the others. Especially because it is made of slightly different materials than the ones that come out of the Swiss atelier. I my self considered the LWH, but I'm glad I settled on the LRS standard. The larger kite takes alot more space and indoor flying would need an airplane hanger!. Write to Thomas Horvath. He is very approachable, friendly and informative. He will help you with the perspective of a real flyer and no sales hype. I LOVE his kites. More $ but utterly worth it. My go-to SLK. Mitch

I have seen fighter kites flown off of a single main line, and they dart around like mad. They were on 30' of line off of the main line and set well enough apart that the odds of one tangling into the line of the next was small. The problem with Walas would not be that they are so wild, as they need a little pressure on the line or they nose dive. They bob in the wind like a dolphin, but I don't know what would happen if it were the kites themselves and not you hand maintianing the tension. Keep us up on the process.

Tom, Completely sweet kite. Pops out in the sky. I don't know about you in Central IL, but here in St. Louis we had a tornado last night. I went out at 5 am to catch the last of the winds, after the rain and flying debris was over. How did you get that big thing down to the ground again? Is there a Kite Party locally that I could get to from here, or are you going to strut your stuff at Huntington Beach? I can't seem to find much kite action here in the Midwest. Any hints? Congrats on the kite. Mitch

This is some serious prizerating! Especially for us low wind non coasters. Mitch

Wow. What a beut! I have kite-lust.

Right! Alan Cunningham. However, he got Sky Shark P 90's from me and completely reframed it for Indoor. Now that's Very interesting. You mean you can re-frame it lighter and it still keeps its balance for better glide? Is there a vid of this flight anywhere? It's a beautiful kite even as a fixed line toy so I can't imaging how graceful such a minimalist kite would look as a glider. What would Litsong Lu do in a case like this? LOL Mitch

Thanks for the pic and the advice. It does help. I've got my eye on the XL but keep hoping against hope that the Manta will go back into production. So that's two on the "gifts for me" list. Mitch

Anybody have experience with premier's Canard? Supposed to be pretty responsive and perhaps even steerable low wind SLK, but the only vids I can find are very brief not suggest any nimble flight characteristics. My Wala broke it's back and while I intend to fix it, my eye is now wandering. Mitch

I believe you' right. You don't want weight, you want drag. The drag increases as you need it with stronger winds. For home made, I sometime use construction tape (barrier tape). It is pretty tough, comes in bright colors and you can even get some that says "caution, hard hat area' on it. I don't like winding long tapes so if I want more drag, I loop it from wing tip to wing tip. That adds an extra degree of stability it addition to holding the back of the kite solidly down wind. My fav, though, is drogues. They provide plenty of drag, are light weight and very easy to pack up and store. And they have a measure of lift so they don't change your minimum wind range as much. Not as flashy as a great swinging colorful 7 ribbon dragon tail, but it never tangles. I also have what must have been designed to be a garden wind ornament. It looks that a bowel made of twisted ripstop strips that spins in the wind. The extra energy it takes to spin it adds more drag, but the spinning colors are cool to look at. Good luck with the freshening wind. Take pictures of your kite with your plane.

Absolutely! Skill, speed, real mastery of the medium. Quite and eye opening demonstration of what these planes can do. I could not have guessed that they could hover right side up or upside down, much less turn themselves virtually inside out. Have you seen duel line stunt kite displays? It's very similar. So many tricks and turns one on the next that it's almost too fast to follow. Most impressive. Thanks. Have you gotten your Biplane up?

Very cool indeed, and cool that you've got a frozen pond behind you house. Though these pictures confirm my impression of your part of the country that it is snowbound in late August. Thanks for the pics. Beautiful area. My no doubt outdated impression of RC planes was that they were loud, hot, smelly and dangerous. So I'm a quiet kite guy. But your electric motor plane seems more civilized. They make RC kites. The link below is a quick vid of a couple of different indoor types. But they make outside ones as well. You wouldn't even have to freeze your fingers for a nice Winter's flight.

Wow! Thanks. Nice pics. Very clear explanation. Looks simple enough that even I could try it. I wonder if your new biplane can left that. There is a a serious group of kite photo enthusiasts, some of whom are architects, city planners or biologists, and plenty of just fun fliers, with whom you might trade secrets. Big steady kites (like Conyne or winged box kites). Some speak about having an image on the ground, but I'm not sure how they do that. There is a string between the kite and ground (?) Are you the one near the fat arrow, or closer to the barn at the skinny arrow?

Ribcracker, It looks Bee-u-tiful. I'd love to see it up against the sky. Good luck. Was that your aerial photo? Nice! How do you know what you're taking a picture of?

Bud, I don't know about biplane kites specifically, but it sounds like a species of foil. In general, when you lift an airfoil off a flat surface by the main flight line, it should make about a 15degree angle up from the table. Then you fiddle by a few degrees at a time from there. You make it sound as though the flight line would be leading the kite by the nose, but I suspect you mean the nose line leads back to meet the two back lines in triange under the kite. Also, heavier kites need more of a lead, that is to say the triangle hangs farther from the lowest point of the kite. What many do when they are experimenting with this sort of thing is they use one line for the back two attachments that are tied into a loop. That back loop can be larks headed behind knots tied at intervals in the forward part of the bridle. So you try it. Not enough lift? Undo the larks head and tie it farther from the front of kite. Longer front bridle line so the kite hangs at a flatter angle from the horizontal. up in the sky with the line below it, the nose points up more. More lift. Hope I'm being clear. Mitch